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The 
Leaders of Men 

AND 

THE THREE GREATEST EPOCHS 

in'the history of the 
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CONSECRATED TO 

FREEDOM, HUMANITY AND 
DEMOCRACY 

Gr e. o ^ ~ " ' . 



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E. Coppee Mitchell Lodge, No. 605 

Free and Accepted Masons 

Monday, May Twenty-First 



Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen 



JOHN L. BIPPERT 

Worshipful Master 



Arranged and Compiled by 
GEORGE C. SMALL, P. M. 




DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America. 

HEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one 
people to dissolve the poUtical bands which have connected them 
with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the 
separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of 
nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires 
that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; 
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that 
among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure 
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just 
powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of gov- 
ernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to 
alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations 
on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall 
seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will 
dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and 
transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are 
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by 
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of 
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design 
to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to 
throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. 
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the 
necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. 
The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries 
and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute 
tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid 
world: 

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for 
the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate 
and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent 
should be obtained ; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend 
to them. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large 
districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representa- 
tion in the legislature; a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants 



only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfort- 
able and distant from the repository of their public records, for the sole purpose 
of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved repre- 
sentative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness, his invasions on 
the rights of the people. He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, 
to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of 
annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state 
remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from with- 
out, and convulsions within. He has endeavored to prevent the population of 
these states; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for the naturalization of 
foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and 
raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has obstructed the 
administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary 
powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of 
their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a 
multitude of new^ offices, and sent hither sw^arms of officers to harass our people 
and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing 
armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the 
military independent of, and superior to, the civil power. He has combined, 
with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions, and 
unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended 
legislation: 

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: 
For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment, for any murders 
which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states: For cutting off 
our trade with all parts of the world: For imposing taxes upon us without our 
consent: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury: For 
transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses: For abolishing 
the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein 
an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at 
once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule 
into these colonies: For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable 
laws, and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments: For sus- 
pending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power 
to legislate for us in all cases w^hatsoever: 

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, 
and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, 
burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is, at this time, 
transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of 
death, desolation and tyranny already begun, w^ith circumstances of cruelty 
and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally un- 



worthy the head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow-citizens, 
taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become 
the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their 
hands. He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored 
to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose 
known rule of w^arfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and 
conditions. 

In every stage of these oppressions, w^e have petitioned for redress, in 
the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by 
repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act w^hich 
may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. 

Nor have w^e been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We 
have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend 
an unw^arrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circum- 
stances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their 
native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our 
common kindred, to disavow^ these usurpations, which would inevitably inter- 
rupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the 
voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the 
necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the 
rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends. 

We, therefore, the representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMER- 
ICA, IN GENERAL CONGRESS assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge 
of the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the 
authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare. 
That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDE- 
PENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British 
crown, and that all political connection betw^een them and the State of Great 
Britain, is, and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDE- 
PENDENT STATES, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, 
contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which 
INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this 
declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, 
w^e mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred 
honor. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE MASSACHUSETTS 

JOSIAH BARTLETT JOHN HANCOCK 

WILLIAM WHIPPLE JOHN ADAMS 

MATTHEW THORNTON SAMUEL ADAMS 



ROBERT TREAT PAINE 
ELBRIDGE GERRY 

RHODE ISLAND 
STEPHEN HOPKINS 
WILLIAM ELLERY 

CONNECTICUT 
ROGER SHERMAN 
SAMUEL HUNTINGDON 
WILLIAM WILLIAMS 
OLIVER WOLCOTT 

NEW YORK 
WILLIAM FLOYD 
PHILIP LIVINGSTON 
FRANCIS LEWIS 
LEWIS MORRIS 

NEW JERSEY 
RICHARD STOCKTON 
JOHN WITHERSPOON 
FRANCIS HOPKINSON 
JOHN HART 
ABRAHAM CLARK 

PENNSYLVANIA 
ROBERT MORRIS 
BENJAMIN RUSH 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
JOHN MORTON 
GEORGE CLYMER 
JAMES SMITH 
GEORGE TAYLOR 
JAMES WILSON 
GEORGE ROSS 



DELAWARE 
C/ESAR RODNEY 
GEORGE READ 
THOMAS McKEAN 

MARYLAND 
SAMUEL CHASE 
THOMAS STONE 
WILLIAM PACA 
CHARLES CARROLL, of Carrollton 

VIRGINIA 

GEORGE WYTHE 
RICHARD HENRY LEE 
THOMAS JEFFERSON 
BENJAMIN HARRISON 
THOMAS NELSON, JR. 
FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE 
CARTER BRAXTON 

NORTH CAROLINA 
WILLIAM HOOPER 
JOSEPH HEWES 
JOHN PENN 

SOUTH CAROLINA 

EDWARD RUTLEDGE 
THOMAS HEYWARD, JR. 
THOMAS LYNCH, JR. 
ARTHUR MIDDLETON 

GEORGIA 
BUTTON GWINNETT 
LYMAN HALL 
GEORGE WALTON 




'In the stars are the glory of the sky, 
so great men are the glory of their 
country, yea, of the whole earth." 

Heine. 




Its beauty is in what it symbolizes: 

RED, the valor and bravery of the Men, 
WHITE, the devotion and loyalty of the Women, 
BLUE, the victory of their mutual and unselfish sacrifices, 
studded with the ever-present brilliant Stars of their 
achievements, for Freedom, Humanity and Christianity. 

George C. Small. 



The Star-Spangled Banner 

September 14th, 1814— Francis Scott Key 

Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, 

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? 
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight. 

O'er the ramparts we watch' d were so gallantly streaming? 
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, 

Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there; 
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave. 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

On the shore, dimly seen thro' the midst of the deep. 

Where the foes' haughty host in dread silence reposes, 
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep 

As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? 
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, 

In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream: 
'Tis the star-spangled banner, Oh! long may it wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! 

Oh! thus be it e'er when freemen shall stand 

Between their loved homes and the war's desolation; 
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land 

Praise the povv'r that hath made and preserved us a nation 
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just. 

And this be our motto, " In God is our trust." 
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 




LINCOLN'S 
GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 

NOVEMBER 19th, 1863 

[OURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 
this continent a new nation, conceived in hberty, and dedicated 
to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are 
engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any 
nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are 
met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a por- 
tion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives 
that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that w^e should 
do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate 
— we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who 
struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or 
detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, 
but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, 
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here 
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated 
to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we 
take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full meas- 
ure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have 
died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of free- 
dom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, 
shall not perish from the earth. 

A. LINCOLN 




PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS 

:: APRIL 2d, 1917 :: 

HAVE called the Congress into extraordinary session because there 
are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made 
immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally per- 
missible that I should assume the responsibility of making. 

On the 3rd of February last 1 officially laid before you the 
extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and 
after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of 
law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to 
approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the w^estern coasts 
of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within 
the Mediterranean. 

That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare 
earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial Government had 
somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with 
its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk, and that 
due warning w^ould be given to all other vessels w^hich its submarines might 
seek to destroy when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care 
taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in 
their open boats. 

The precautions taken were meagre and haphazard enough, as proved in 
distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly 
business, but a certain degree of restraint w^as observed. 

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, 
w^hatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, 
have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning, and without thought 
of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along 
with those of belligerents. 

Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and 
stricken people of Belgium, though the latter w^ere provided w^ith safe conduct 
through the proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were 
distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk w^ith the 
same reckless lack of compassion or of principle. 

1 was for a little while unable to believe that such things w^ould in fact 
be done by any Government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane 
practices of civilized nations. 



International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law which 
would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of 
dominion and where lay the free highways of the world. By painful stage 
after stage has that law been built up with meagre enough results, indeed, after 
all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view, 
at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded. 

This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under 
the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it 
could use at sea except those which it is impossible to employ as it is employing 
them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for 
the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the 
world. 

I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and 
serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the 
lives of non-combatants, men, w^omen and children, engaged in pursuits w^hich 
have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed 
innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and 
innocent people cannot be. 

The present German warfare against commerce is a warfare against 
mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk. 
American lives taken, in w^ays which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, 
but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been 
sunk and overwhelmed in the w^aters in the same way. There has been no 
discrimination. 

The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how 
it w^ill meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made w^ith a 
moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character 
and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feelings away. 

Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical 
might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which 
w^e are only a single champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of February last I thought 
that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the 
seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against 
unlawful violence. 

But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because sub- 
marines are in effect outlaw^s w^hen used as the German submarines have been 
used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their 
attacks as the law^ of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend 
themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft, giving chase upon the 



e 



open sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances — grim necessity, 
indeed — to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown their own 
intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all. 

The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all 
within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the defence of 
rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their right to 
defend. 

The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed 
on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject 
to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough 
at best; in such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse 
than ineffectual; it is likely at once to produce what it was meant to prevent; 
it is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the 
effectiveness of the belligerents. 

There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: We 
will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our 
Nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which 
we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they cut to the very roots 
of human life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of th 
step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in 
unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that 
the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government 
to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the 
United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus 
been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the 
country in a more thorough state of defence, but also to exert all its power 
and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire 
to terms and end the war. 

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable 
co-operation in counsel and action with the Governments now at war with 
Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those Governments of the 
most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may, so far as possible, 
be added to theirs. 

It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material 
resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental 
needs of the Nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and 
efficient w^ay possible. 

It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects 
but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's 
submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of 



the United States already provided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 
men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principal of universal 
liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional incre- 
ments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in 
training. 

It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the 
Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by 
the present generation, by well conceived taxation. I say sustained so far 
as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most 
unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money 
borrow^ed. 

It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we 
may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to 
arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accom- 
plished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as little 
as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of our own mili- 
tary forces with the duty — for it will be a very practical duty — of supplying 
the nations already at war with Germany with the materials which they can 
obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are in the field and we 
should help them in every way to be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several executive 
departments of the Government for the consideration of your committees, 
measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned. 
I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been framed 
after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon which the 
responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the Nation will most 
directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be 
. very clear and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our 
objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and nor- 
mal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and 1 do not 
believe that the thought of the Nation has been altered or clouded by them. 

I have exactly the same thing in mind now that I had in mind when 
I addressed the Senate on the 2 2d of January last; the same that I had in 
mind when 1 addressed the Congress on 3d of February and on the 26th of 
February. Our object now^, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace 
and the justice in the life of the w^orld as against selfish and autocratic pow^er 
and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world 
such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observ- 
ance of those principles. 



Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the 
world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that 
peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed 
by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will 
of the people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances. 

We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the 
same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be 
observed among nations and their governments that are observed among 
the individual citizens of civilized States. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling 
toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their 
impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with 
their previous knowledge or approval. 

It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in 
the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers 
and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little 
groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow-men as 
pawns and tools. 

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor States with spies or set 
the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which 
will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs 
can be successfully worked only under cover and where no one has the right 
to ask questions. 

Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may 
be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the 
light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded con- 
fidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible 
where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concern- 
ing all the nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a 
partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic Government could be 
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league 
of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the 
plotters of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account 
to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peo- 
ples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and 
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our 
hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening 
things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? 



Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in 
fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the 
intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their 
habitual attitude toward life. 

The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long 
as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact 
Russian in origin, in character or purpose, and now it has been shaken, and 
the great, generous Russian people have been added, in all their native 
majesty and might, to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world 
for justice and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a league of honor. 

One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian auto- 
cracy was not and could never be our friend is that that from the very out- 
set of the present war it has filled our unsuspected communities, and even 
our offices of government, with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere 
afoot against our national unity of council, our peace within and w^ithout, 
our industries and our commerce. 

Indeed, it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war 
began, and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in 
our courts of justice that the intrigues which have more than once come 
perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the 
country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even 
under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government 
accredited to the Government of the United States. 

Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have 
sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them, because 
we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the 
German people tow^ard us (who w^ere no doubt as ignorant of them as we 
ourselves were), but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did 
what it pleased and told its people nothing. 

But they have played their part in serving to convince us at last that 
that Government entertains no real friendship for us and means to act 
against our peace and security at its convenience. That it means to stir up 
enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German 
Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know 
that in such a Government, following such methods, we can never have a 
friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait 
to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security 
for the democratic governments of the world. 

We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to lib- 
erty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the Nation to check 



and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the 
facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ulti- 
mate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German 
peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privi- 
lege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and obedience. 

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted 
upon the trusted foundation of political liberty. 

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no domin- 
ion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for 
the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of 
the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been 
as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancor and without selfish objects, seek- 
ing nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peo- 
ples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without 
passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right 
and of fair play we profess to be fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the Governments allied with the Imperial Gov- 
ernment of Germany because they have not made war upon us or challenged 
us to defend our right and our honor. 

The Austro-Hungarian Government has indeed avowed its unqualified 
endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare 
adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government and it 
has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tar- 
nowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the 
Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government 
has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on 
the seas, and 1 take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a dis- 
cussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna. We enter this war 
only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means 
of defending our rights. 

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a 
high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in 
enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring about any injury or 
disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible 
Government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of 
right and is running amuck. 

We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, 
and shall desire nothing so much as the early re-establishment of intimate 
relations of mutual advantage between us — however hard it may be for them, 
for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have 



borne with their present Government through all these bitter months because 
of that friendship exercising a patience and forbearance which would other- 
wise have been impossible. 

We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in 
our daily attitude and actions towards the millions of men and women of 
German birth and native sympathy who live among us and share our life, 
and we shall be proud to prove it toward all who are in fact loyal to their 
neighbors and to the Government in the hour of test. They are, most of 
them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known an> other 
fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and 
restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose. 

If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of 
stern repression; but if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and 
there and without countenance except from a law^less and malignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the Congress, w^hich 
1 have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many 
months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead 
this great, peaceful people into war — into the most terrible and disastrous 
of all w^ars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. 

But the right is more precious than peace, and w^e shall fight for the 
things which w^e have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for 
the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their ow^n Gov- 
ernments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal domin- 
ion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety 
to all nations and make the world itself at last free. 

To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything 
that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know 
that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and 
her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace 
which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. 




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